A Balkans Belgium?

At the end of 2008, basking in the glory of electoral victory, the soon-to-be-inaugurated
Obama regime announced it would be going
boldly backward, revisiting the Balkans and specifically, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The fact that Obama’s foreign policy team looked a lot like Bill Clinton’s
was purely a coincidence, of course.

Nine months later, the Prophet of Hope and Harbinger of Change has shown reluctance
to untangle his crumbling Imperium from the quagmire of Iraq, even as he becomes
more involved in Afghanistan. War there has metastasized over into Pakistan
as well. Not surprisingly, Bosnia has slipped down the list of priorities.

Enter the British, or more specifically the Conservative Party. Almost guaranteed
an election victory in the spring against a devalued
government of Tony Blair’s hapless successor Gordon Brown, the Tories have
now inexplicably decided to outflank the Labor to the left and embrace the
Balkans interventions.

Ashdown’s Talking Points

In a recent
interview for the Independent, Shadow Foreign Secretary William
Hague warned that Bosnia was "on the brink of collapse" that would
create a "black hole in Europe." Create? Bosnia has been a black
hole of social engineering for years!

Not offering any specifics as to how Europe (meaning the EU) would re-engage
in Bosnia, Hague actually recycled the talking points set out last
year by Paddy Ashdown: the problem with Bosnia is the Serbs, encouraged
with "Russian cash." Never mind that Ashdown’s arguments were quickly
demolished
by Ian Bancroft in the Guardian; politics means one must never allow
inconvenient facts to get in the way of a good story.

Two of Hague’s statements are particularly intriguing. First, on the importance
of the Balkans to Imperial plans:

"People think the Balkans are what we debated in the 1990s and now
we can forget about it. In fact, it’s a crucial area in foreign policy in the
next five to 10 years and will get a lot of emphasis in the next Conservative
administration."

Second is his acknowledgment that Bosnia is actually an artificial state,
sustained by force alone:

"The evidence is they [only] get together in Bosnia when there is
some strong outside pressure on them."

Out-Blairing Brown

Something isn’t quite right with this Tory obsession with Bosnia, aside from
the usual troublesome aspects of interventionism. The Balkans crusades were
a Blair thing. John Major’s Conservative cabinet remained positively
restrained in the face of the mass
hysteria that had gripped Britain in the 1990s, with the press filled with
claims of concentration camps, genocide, and all sorts of horrid atrocities.
The Serbs in general, and those in Bosnia in particular, were cast
as evil incarnate, providing a new sense of purpose to both Western activists
deprived of focus by the end of the Cold War and the jihadists done with Afghanistan
for the time being.

The Tories’ reluctance to jump into the Bosnian inferno on the Muslim side,
guns blazing, infuriated the "Bosnia lobby." Cambridge historian
Brendan Simms, for example, called the Major years Britain’s " Unfinest
Hour." In reality, London was at the forefront of peace efforts, which
more often than not ended up being scuttled by the Americans – who later
took all the credit for ending
the war.

Tony Blair, who replaced Major in 1997, was much more receptive to the Manichean
narrative of the Balkans conflict and proved to be Bill Clinton’s staunchest
ally in justifying the 1999
Kosovo war on "humanitarian" grounds. Blair had no problem endorsing
Bush the Lesser’s wars in the Middle East, either. Though the last British
soldiers retreated from Iraq in May
2009, they are still
dying in the sands of Afghanistan.

Unwilling to abandon interventionism – even if the UK of today is hardly
the British Empire of yore –
the Tories are now trying to shift focus from unpopular wars to a seemingly
popular one. That didn’t work for Obama’s Clintonites, and it won’t work for
William Hague and his party boss, David Cameron. But they appear determined
to try.

The Surprise Dissenter

Here is where things get even more curious. A day after Hague’s interview,
the Independent carried a commentary
by Marcus Tanner disagreeing with more intervention. Claiming that Bosnia
has had enough foreign intervention "to last a lifetime," Tanner
lays out a bitter tale of a plan gone terribly wrong:

"The idea was for the bigger of the two [entities] to act as a focus
of national unity, slowly drawing the smaller into its orbit.

"It never happened. Since 1995, it is the bigger entity that has lost
its way, economically and politically. The Serbian Republic, as the other entity
is known, has sharpened up its act and become increasingly self-confident.
Sarajevo did not become the capital of all Bosnians, as the peacemakers of
1995 intended. It dwindled, becoming an almost totally Muslim environment."

Under a succession of viceroys, Tanner explains, Serb and Croat politicians
were dismissed and the central government made stronger, creating a feeling
of entitlement among the Muslims.

"Europeans should stop dangling vague promises of yet more ‘intervention’
in front of the permanently aggrieved Muslims. Bosnia will never be Switzerland.
The country’s DNA won’t allow it. […] The best that we can hope for is a ‘Balkan
Belgium’ – an admittedly loveless arrangement, born out of geopolitical necessity
and which staggers on, after a fashion."

Metaphors and Illustrations

Tanner reported for the Independent from Bosnia, and he wrote a book
about Croatia. He is currently an editor for IWPR.
The last time he discussed Bosnia in any detail was in
2005, when he painted a bleak picture of Bosnian Croats feeling "written
out of the script." What was interesting about that particular piece was
that Tanner blamed the Serbs, who had had very little to do with the Croats’
plight, while completely ignoring the real issue: the Croats’ position as junior
partners in a federation with the Muslims. His most recent op-ed betrays no
such reluctance.

The fundamental
problem in Bosnia isn’t economic or administrative. It is that the three
major communities in that country cannot agree whether they want to live together,
let alone how. With the Serbs and Croats insisting on autonomy while the Muslims
claim the entire country is rightly theirs and theirs alone (calling themselves
"Bosniaks" and renaming the language "Bosnian"), it is
obvious that the only way the country can be kept together is by outside force.

William Hague admitted as much. Yet he and his party boss seemingly want
to believe that people like Mustafa Ceric would give up their Ottoman
dreams for a fistful of euros. It’s hard to decide whether such wishful
thinking is merely naïve or dangerously stupid.

Meanwhile, Belgium itself is becoming
more like Bosnia. Back in 2005, the cover of Paul Belien’s history
of Belgium was an image of the country split apart into Flanders and Wallonia,
circling the drain. A better illustration of Bosnia’s predicament is yet to
be drawn.

Author: Nebojsa Malic

Nebojsa Malic left his home in Bosnia after the Dayton Accords and currently resides in the United States. During the Bosnian War he had exposure to diplomatic and media affairs in Sarajevo. As a historian who specializes in international relations and the Balkans, Malic has written numerous essays on the Kosovo War, Bosnia, and Serbian politics. His exclusive column for Antiwar.com debuted in November 2000.

You must remember when speaking of the British Conservative Party that it is a conservative party in name only. The Leader David Cameron has told us explicitly – his words – the he is 'heir to Blair'.
There is not a tissue paper between the Tory leadership and Blairs Nulabour.
Britain is a one party state. You get to pick the colour on the Rosette. That is why the minor parties are making ground.
With Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia on the map, maybe, finally, courtesy of our Russian friends we may see a Bosnian Serb Republic. Well past time.

Well, I for one can't help but wonder: where are the Waristas (whatever they will be calling themselves at the moment) getting the money for this endless adventure? The UK is broke, broker than the US. Broker than the soon to be flat broke Eu. Where? Where doth the gold come from to finance this ongoing Molochian bloodbath?

Far more interesting than what William Hague said was that it was William Hague who said i! Essentially, he was criticising the EU, which he is supposed to hate, for "not doing enough". It just goes to show how self-evident the EU has become. Belgium could afford to split up, if it wanted to, precisely because all three parts would remain in the EU. I could see a deal emerging from this: Bosnia splits into three parts, with the Croat and Serb bits joining those two countries. Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Muslim Bosnia and an independent Kosovo then all join the EU together, with a Benelux-type open borders agreement between them. Everybody wins! Except of course the US-hegemonists, but then, not even William Hague seems to want them to win nowadays!

Pity the poor Serbs.
From the yoke of Islam to the heel of Hitler andJasenovic. Ethnically cleansed, betrayed and bombed by NATO and now walking blindfold into the proposed diktat of the EU. Have they a death wish?
EU = slavery. It is the absolute antithesis of a free and democratic state.
The majority of the British, particularly the English (who have been left unequal partners in the new 'devolved' Britain – major things free for Scots, Welsh etc the English get nothing – and the bills for the others) want OUTof the EU. Never to the Euro.
Hague, like Cameron, is two faced and cannot be trusted on the EU.
Betrayed again and again by the lib/lab/con party machine, we voted in large numbers for the smaller parties who want out, in June's election.

There seems to be this shadow economy that is not a result of trade, industry or even drugs. It does not shrink or wane in the face of decline in every concievable resource or measure of wealth in society but actually grows and is powerful enough to keep the conventional economic ediface from crumbling , which should really have already happened. It seems to be too big to ascribe to a decadent clan of pedophiliac race horse breeders

@realityzone
There seems to be this shadow economy that is not a result of trade,
industry or even drugs. It does not shrink or wane in the face of
decline in every conceivable resource or measure of wealth in society
but actually grows and is powerful enough to keep the conventional
economic edifice from crumbling , which should really have already
happened. It seems to be too big to ascribe to a decadent clan of
pedophiliac race horse breeders